I've been searching around the forums for what seems to be days now, but there seem to be dozens of different opinions on which settings to adjust and why, and it varies by phpBB version too; I'm running 3.2.1, using an external SMTP process rather than the internal mail function. I wonder if someone could explain it a bit more clearly for me?
First, I think I need to disable 'Send Immediately', as otherwise it will try to send the whole 4,000 emails when I press the Submit button, and the web page would almost certainly time out. By turning that mode off, the whole batch will be generated and queued to be triggered in small batches in the background when other users happen to access the forum index page.
Email Package Size in ACP Email Settings is currently set to 0 - but I'm not even sure if this affects the Mass Email function anyway? Opinions seem to differ, some people say set it zero, others to much larger than total number of emails wanted.
Some advise changing the value in
/includes/acp/acp_email.php
for $max_chunk_size to less than 50. Is this the number of BCC copies added to each email, or the number of separate emails in each batch? And if the latter, how to I set a BCC limit? However that option now seems to be a database entry in the phpbb_config table, email_max_chunk_size, which is currently set to 50 on my board.Also in phpbb_config is the queue_interval value, set to 60 seconds on my board, which I believe is the minimum delay between firing off each new group of messages (which could be longer than that delay of course, depending on how long it is before someone new accesses the forum index page and triggers the next job).
So, basically how do I trigger a Mass Email task to reliably send no more than 15 emails (or 1 email with 15 BCCs) every minute? I don't mind if it takes a while to send all 4,000, but I do want them all gone in a day or two with no risk of losing any.
Andre